Early vision provides general information about the environment that can be used for motor control or navigation and more specialized information that can be used for object recognition. The general information is likely to be insensitive to cognitive factors, but this may not be entirely true for the information used in model-based recognition.

This study examined self-recognition processing in both the auditory and visual modalities by determining how comparable hearing a recording of one’s own voice was to seeing photograph of one’s own face. We also investigated whether the simultaneous presentation of auditory and visual self-stimuli would either facilitate or inhibit self-identification. Ninety-one participants completed reaction-time tasks of self-recognition when presented with their own faces, own voices, and combinations of the two. Reaction time and errors made when responding with (...) both the right and left hand were recorded to determine if there were lateralization effects on these tasks. Our findings showed that visual self-recognition for facial photographs appears to be superior to auditory self-recognition for voice recordings. Furthermore, a combined presentation of one’s own face and voice appeared to inhibit rather than facilitate self-recognition and there was a left-hand advantage for reaction time on the combined-presentation tasks. (shrink)

Making recognition decisions often requires us to reference the contents of working memory, the information available for ongoing cognitive processing. As such, understanding how recognition decisions are made when based on the contents of working memory is of critical importance. In this work we examine whether recognition decisions based on the contents of visual working memory follow a continuous decision process of graded information about the correct choice or a discrete decision process reflecting only knowing and (...) guessing. We find a clear pattern in favor of a continuous latent strength model of visual working memory–based decision making, supporting the notion that visual recognition decision processes are impacted by the degree of matching between the contents of working memory and the choices given. Relation to relevant findings and the implications for human information processing more generally are discussed. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how (...) the normal brain might accomplish the complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

Since its inception as a topic of inquiry, mirror-self-recognition has usually been explained by two models: one, initiated by Guillaume, proposes that mirror-self-recognition depends upon kinesthetic-visual matching, and the other, initiated by Gallup, that self-recognition depends upon a self-concept. These two models are examined historically and conceptually. This examination suggests that the kinesthetic-visual matching model is conceptually coherent and makes reasonable and accurate predictions; and that the self-concept model is conceptually incoherent and makes inaccurate predictions (...) from premises which are themselves inaccurate. From a theoretical standpoint, the kinesthetic-visual matching model is the better explanation of self-recognition. (shrink)

In the present study, we addressed the problem of whether hand representations, derived from the control of hand gesture, are used in handedness recognition. Pictures of hands and fingers, assuming either common or uncommon postures, were presented to right-handed subjects, who were required to judge their handedness. In agreement with previous results (Parsons, 1987, 1994; Gentilucci, Daprati, & Gangitano, 1998), subjects recognized handedness through mental movement of their own hand in order to match the posture of the presented hand. (...) This was proved by a control experiment of physical matching. The new finding was that presentation of common finger postures affected responses differently from presentation of less common finger postures. These effects could be not attributed to mental matching movements nor related to richness in hand-finger cues useful for handedness recognition. The results of the present study are discussed in the context of the notion that implicit visual analysis of the presented hands is performed before mental movement of one's hand takes place (Parsons, 1987; Gentilucci et al., 1998). In this process, hand representation acquired by experience in the control and observation of one's and other people's hand gestures is used. We propose that such an immediate recognition mechanism belongs to the class of mental processes which are grouped under the name of intuition, that is, the processes by which situations or people's intentions are immediately understood, without conscious reasoning. (shrink)

Modality specificity in priming is taken as evidence for independent perceptual systems. However, Easton, Greene, and Srinivas (1997) showed that visual and haptic cross-modal priming is comparable in magnitude to within-modal priming. Where appropriate, perceptual systems might share like information. To test this, we assessed priming and recognition for visual and auditory events, within- and across- modalities. On the visual test, auditory study resulted in no priming. On the auditory priming test, visual study resulted in (...) priming that was only marginally less than within-modal priming. The priming results show that visual study facilitates identification on both visual and auditory tests, but auditory study only facilitates performance on the auditory test. For both recognition tests, within-modal recognition exceeded cross-modal recognition. The results have two novel implications for the understanding of perceptual priming: First, we introduce visual and auditory priming for spatio-temporal events as a new priming paradigm chosen for its ecological validity and potential for information exchange. Second, we propose that the asymmetry of the cross-modal priming observed here may reflect the capacity of these perceptual modalities to provide cross-modal constraints on ambiguity. We argue that visual perception might inform and constrain auditory processing, while auditory perception corresponds to too many potential visual events to usefully inform and constrain visual perception. (shrink)

This study adopted a change detection task to investigate whether and how recognition intent affects the construction of orthographic representation in visual word recognition. Chinese readers and nonreaders detected color changes in radical components of Chinese characters. Explicit recognition demand was imposed in Experiment 2 by an additional recognition task. When the recognition was implicit, a bias favoring the radical location informative of character identity was found in Chinese readers , but not nonreaders . (...) With explicit recognition demands, the effect of radical location interacted with radical function and word frequency . An estimate of identification performance under implicit recognition was derived in Experiment 3. These findings reflect the joint influence of recognition intent and orthographic regularity in shaping readers’ orthographic representation. The implication for the role of visual attention in word recognition was also discussed. (shrink)

The structure of the deep artificial neural network is similar to the structure of the biological neural network, which can be well applied to the 3D visual image recognition of aerobics movements. A lot of results have been achieved by applying deep neural networks to the 3D visual image recognition of aerobics movements, but there are still many problems to be overcome. After analyzing the expression characteristics of the convolutional neural network model for the three-dimensional (...) class='Hi'>visual image characteristics of aerobics, this paper builds a convolutional neural network model. The model is improved on the basis of the traditional model and unifies the process of aerobics 3D visual image segmentation, target feature extraction, and target recognition. The convolutional neural network and the deep neural network based on autoencoder are designed and applied to aerobics action 3D visual image test set for recognition and comparison. We improve the accuracy of network recognition by adjusting the configuration parameters in the network model. The experimental results show that compared with other simple models, the model based on the improved AdaBoost algorithm can improve the final result significantly when the accuracy of each model is average. Therefore, the method can improve the recognition accuracy when multiple neural network models with general accuracy are obtained, thereby avoiding the complicated parameter adjustment process to obtain a single optimal network model. (shrink)

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) (...) biases in the LH. We show two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme-phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme-phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme-phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing. (shrink)